


Cast by Flames

by Sp00py



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Angst, Eldritch Creature OC, I just wanted to fuck up Zuko, Other, Rape/Non-con Elements, Spiritual torture, Torture, bc who doesn't, starts when he's 13
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 03:34:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,052
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25477759
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sp00py/pseuds/Sp00py
Summary: After his Agni Kai, Zuko sees things in the darkness. The only trouble is that they see him back.
Relationships: Zuko/A Spirit
Comments: 3
Kudos: 42





	Cast by Flames

**Author's Note:**

> The spirit is absolutely _not_ loosely inspired by doceo_percepto's more eldritch Bendy from _Bendy and the Ink Machine_. No-sirree.

Sometimes, Zuko thinks he can see things out of his left eye. Which, he can, but they are dark, amorphous -- just shapes. That’s the best he’ll ever hope for, he’s been told, and it will only grow darker with time. He can’t hear anything, either, except deep thumps that he recognizes as the vibrations of voices on his left, or footsteps which refuse to coalesce into true sound. And yet, sometimes, he does hear things. Songs, words, the whistling of wind even when he’s in the bowels of the _Wani_.

He gets cold, when he starts to hear those things, starts to see figures moving who aren’t really there. Zuko might be going mad. Trauma, the medic calls it. A wounded spirit, his uncle says. It has been two months since his banishment. The mark of shame his father left is not entirely healed, but it is no longer oozing pus and hot with infection. Zuko tries not to cry in the dark, because it is shameful, and because he can’t on his left side anymore. He tries not to be afraid.

A hand touches his chin as he stares, unseeing, at the ceiling. Suddenly, Zuko’s father is there, in Zuko’s tiny quarters, kneeling on his chest, pressing his hand to Zuko’s face and burning, burning, _burning_. He wants to scream, to beg though it will do nothing, but all the air’s been consumed by the flames. The world is so bright, it’s black. Zuko’s drowning.

Then, it’s cold. That’s how burns go, Zuko now knows intimately, flaming hot, icy cold. His entire body must have been burned, because it aches all the way down to his bones. He struggles to get air, struggles to find the warmth inside of him like a fragile drop of sunlight. Firebenders generate their own element, and though he’s not a good one, he _is_ a firebender.

Zuko pulls it from his core, through his veins, as more hands grab, as the cold bites deeper and claws into him as though searching for that same heat. He can hear, but not on his right. There’s only sound to his left, only shapes in the darkness of his disfigured eye. Warmth drips down his arms. Pain laces from the inside of his arms, pits to elbows. Zuko holds his arms up and stares at the coursing rivulets of gold like blood that coat his hands.

He’s standing.

Zuko whips around, eyes flitting back and forth, searching for an enemy, or an explanation, or _anything._ The world is dark. Empty. Vast. Fog rolls on unfelt winds, and those cursed tears blur Zuko’s already failing eye. Something is moving out there. Something large. Something with gold splashed up its claws.

He wakes up, and sits up so fast, that he almost collides with Uncle Iroh, whose hands are on his shoulders.

“Zuko!” he cries out in joy, old reflexes saving them both a new headache.

Zuko opens his mouth to respond, but gags. He shoves Iroh aside and fumbles out of bed for a bucket, just barely making it to vomit stomach acid and air. Zuko curls protectively around the bucket as his stomach clenches and his muscles spasm, but nothing else comes up. For some reason, he’s surprised, but he shakes away the images of black tar.

A warm hand, calloused from war, touches his clammy back.

“Leave,” Zuko growls, face flushing because of his own weakness.

“Zuko --”

Zuko twists around, throwing a pathetic arc of flames, but it’s enough for Iroh to back off. Zuko’s firebending has suffered greatly now that flames terrify him, and it exposes his fear that he’d resort to it so quickly. “I said leave!”

Uncle Iroh’s shoulders sag, and Zuko hates the pitying way he looks at him, but he does as Zuko orders. “I’ll be taking breakfast on the deck,” Iroh says invitingly, but doesn’t push it, then he’s gone, and Zuko’s alone.

The sun is peeking over the horizon, its rays feeling out Zuko as he huddles in the corner with his bucket. He has no cuts, no blood on him, but he still feels so cold.

He joins his uncle on the deck, and neither speak about the night terror. It isn’t the first, but as the sun rises higher, the memories of it fade from Zuko’s mind like all the others. He has more important things to focus on.

* * *

They make it into the Southern Air Temple, just like the soldiers did a hundred years ago. It’s challenging, because their paths are overgrown and worn down with time, but Zuko hacks his way through, a second violation, but one impeded only by nature.

Zuko goes off on his own, since Uncle Iroh seems content to share tea with a flying lemur so young that it never learned fear. _Useless_ , he thinks, and he tries to convince himself that he’s talking about his uncle.

The stone halls are full of wind, devoid of everything else. Zuko doesn’t even know where he’s going, but he hopes Agni might favor him, just this once. The temple is labyrinthine, designed for those who are light on their feet, barely tethered to the earth, not angry, scarred, firebending teenagers.

It doesn’t deter him, even as he finds helmets. Skeletons. Fire Nation soldiers slain serving their people. More skeletons, in tatters of orange and yellow. Some are so small. Zuko’s steps falter, slow. Too many small skeletons, pouring out of a room down the hall as though -- as though they had been discovered hiding, and ran. He turns his head away, but catches movement out of the corner of his left eye. Someone’s in there. He squints into the darker recesses. Another movement on the periphery. 

Zuko stalks forward, cautious, but ready to attack if the avatar is for some reason hiding among the skeletons of his people.

A whisper, not words, but not wind, either, and he whirls to the left, hands raised defensively. Nothing. It’s always nothing. One day, Zuko will accept that he’ll never see, never hear anything on his left side again.

He scans the room again, keeping his eyes high enough to not see the bones, but there’s no place to hide. Zuko turns around, and suddenly he’s being dragged back by a hand -- no, many hands -- on his left arm, his shoulder, yanking at his tunic.

Zuko falls back and bone and stone clatters around him. He hits his head -- or no, there’s no pain, but the world is undulating in one eye, murmuring in one ear. The other side is the temple, and, only a foot a way, the skull of a _child_. Nausea churns, and Zuko thinks this might be the angry, restless spirits of the Air Nomads, exerting their revenge on the heir to their genocide.

For a second, he thinks to accept that. It seems fair to be torn apart by the ghosts of these children. This wasn’t a battle, after all. It couldn’t have been. But then graceful defeat is washed away in a rising tide of fear. _Zuko_ is only a child. He knows that, as much as he denies it. He’s only thirteen. He doesn’t want to die, Father, please --

It’s cold again. That shocks him from seeing his father looming, silhouetted by flames, surrounded by heat. Why is it always so damn cold? (Zuko would never have cussed before, but his crew weren’t his family, they didn’t care about how he appeared to others, and had a far more colorful vocabulary.) He huffs a pathetic spark of flame by instinct, and instead of warming him, it causes something to latch on like it’s trying to suck out his soul. Zuko screams, silent, swallowed by the darkness on his mouth.

From one eye, he can see the room. Nothing is there. The other sees the truth, sees the darkness dripping, the limbs rising and falling in a miasma, groping for heat, seeking _his_ warmth. He pulls it close and closes up tight, like a pearl in a shell. It’s his. It’s the only thing he has left, even if flames had scarred him, even if --

Zuko gags as something bitter and salty slithers into his mouth, chasing his inner fire as he tries to hide it, tries to smother it to save it. Sshhh, sshh, don’t cry, don’t beg, don’t throw up, don’t displease Father -- don’t -- don’t -- he can’t focus. He’s so cold, and he’s drowning again.

The hands grab him, force him to the ground, cover him like a blanket in inky darkness. Even his good eye, the eye that still sees sunlight and birds outside the room’s windows, is being flooded with darkness, like paper burning away, like his skin and hair and senses.

Zuko spasms, writhes, claws at a floor he can feel but can no longer see. The hands are talons, flaying his arms, his stomach, digging, digging, digging for his core. His dream. His nightmare, relived. It burns, not with fire, but with slicing pain, and golden blood sprays across the form. Teeth flash, outlined in glistening spatters. So many, sharp and grinning right in front of his face, because its tongue is down his throat.

It twists, laps at something incorporeal deep inside him, and a shudder wracks Zuko’s frame. He feels blind in a way that is hard to describe, like he’s lost all sense of himself, but for the icy tendril licking and coiling inside. It’s _revolting_. More -- tongues? Drag across his arms and chest, tracing the paths of his rushing, fiery blood. He wishes he could pass out, but somehow despite no breath, despite the blood gushing and the freezing cold, his idiot brain clings stubbornly to consciousness. His body, dragged to its baser instincts to survive, animalistically refuses to still.

Eventually, though, his energy flags. Zuko doesn’t pass out (he is never so lucky), but he simply can’t struggle anymore. He’s going to die. With every violating stroke, he feels as though his inner fire is doused, sputtering and smoking as it fights. Zuko wants to fight. He doesn’t want to die, but he’s so, so weak. Father was right. What sort of firebender gives up so easily? What sort of _prince_?

The creature licks and lingers and _tastes_ him endlessly. Zuko barely registers when the hands lift, when the dripping black tongue pulls from his throat, from his mouth, leaving only an icy sting in its wake. The darkness recedes, and external warmth floods in to replace it.

The sun is still high. It had felt like an eternity, but only an hour or two must have passed. The skull is staring at him with its empty, shadowed sockets, witness to -- whatever that was.

Zuko lays there a while longer, flirting with unconsciousness, before he rouses himself. There are no cuts, no blood, not even a bump on his head from his fall. It was all some illusion, then? It felt so real, yet for all he endured there is no harm except small scorch marks from Zuko scratching the floor and kicking. There are no enemies here, only himself.

He mustn’t be weak. That -- that was weak. His own mind turned traitor. Zuko is pathetic.

Uncle Iroh glances up from his reading (had he not been searching at all, Zuko has to wonder with irritation) as Zuko stumbles out into the full glory of the sun. It feels wonderful, and almost manages to banish the cold. Zuko rubs his arms subconsciously. At Iroh’s slight look of concern, he forces his arms to his sides. He won’t be weak.

“Any luck, Prince Zuko?” Uncle is always so accommodating, so calm. Zuko wants to scream in anger, in pain, in -- in -- in something he can’t even find the words for. He doesn’t understand how Iroh can be so still with fire raging inside.

“There’s nothing here,” Zuko mutters, shoving his way past Iroh to the edge of the platform. Far below, the valley in the mountains is full of fog, ruins looming like ancient skeletons. It must have been beautiful a hundred years ago, full of life, full of children. Zuko thinks he can see things moving in the fog. Abruptly, he turns away and grits his teeth as the world darkens momentarily and gooseflesh rises on his arms. “Let’s go.”


End file.
